Stuart Russell

It also speaks all of their languages.

and it can devote 24 hours a day to each individual person on Earth to convince them to do whatever it wants them to do.

Yeah, water supplies.

So this is one of the routes by which AI systems could bring about a medium-sized catastrophe, is by basically shutting down our life support systems.

Yes, I think it's virtually certain unless something else intervenes like a nuclear war or we may refrain from doing it.

But I think it will be extraordinarily difficult for us to refrain.

I actually think it'll take longer.

I don't think you can make a prediction based on engineering in the sense that, yes, we could make machines 10 times bigger and 10 times faster, but that's probably not the reason why we don't have AGI, right?

In fact, I think we have far more computing power than we need for AGI.

maybe a thousand times more than we need.

The reason we don't have AGI is because we don't understand how to make it properly.

What we've seized upon

is one particular technology called the language model.

And we observed that as you make language models bigger, they produce text language that's more coherent and sounds more intelligent.

And so mostly what's been happening in the last few years is just, okay, let's keep doing that.

Because one thing companies are very good at, unlike universities, is spending money.

They have spent gargantuan amounts of money, and they're going to spend even more gargantuan amounts of money.

I mean, you know, we mentioned nuclear weapons.

So the Manhattan Project...

in World War II to develop nuclear weapons, its budget in 2025 dollars was about 20 odd billion dollars.